Built for the SME contractor P6 was never priced for.
SchedAI is AI-assisted CPM scheduling for construction SMEs — it turns a Bill of Quantities into a fully sequenced, DCMA-checked tender schedule, guided by the same planning logic used on multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects. No P6 licence. No full-time planner.
Why SchedAI was built
The AI construction scheduling market has consolidated around enterprise buyers — tools built for Tier 1 contractors with a resourced planning team and a six-figure software budget. Meanwhile the actual SME reality has been unchanged since the 1990s: the schedule gets built in Excel or a trial copy of MS Project, by the estimator or the PM, at 9pm, the night before it's due.
SchedAI exists to close the gap that every enterprise tool ignores: a contractor's own productivity rates, applied to their own measured quantities, to derive real durations — the same logic that wins the tender, never connected to the schedule that has to deliver it. Some of the specific pain points that drove the build:
A missed notice period costs the entire claim
Australian courts consistently enforce contractual time bars. Without an updated schedule showing critical path impact, an EOT claim is unarguable — and most SMEs can't afford a delay expert until it's already a dispute.
Knowing what to build, not how to click the software
Translating "a 2,400m² warehouse slab with in-ground services" into 60 correctly sequenced activities is genuinely expert work — and most AI scheduling tools assume you already have a schedule to optimise.
The estimate and the schedule are built twice
By two people, with two sets of assumptions — and they disagree from day one. Nobody ever compares the planned rate to the achieved rate, so the rate book never gets tested.
Within three weeks, the baseline is fiction
Progress updating is manual and always the first thing dropped under pressure. Nobody trusts the schedule, so nobody uses it, so nobody updates it — the death spiral that leaves a contractor with no contemporaneous record when a claim actually matters.
Drawn from SmartConstructAI's own market research into AI-assisted CPM scheduling for SME construction contractors, 2026.
Built for the full delivery lifecycle
SchedAI starts at the tender — but the plan is a single tool that carries your schedule through contract, delivery, and claims, so the data you build once keeps paying off.
Bid (Tender)
- Turn a BoQ into a sequenced, DCMA-checked draft schedule
- AI-guided elicitation — sequencing, resourcing, constraints, calendar
- Export a tender-ready barchart in one sitting
Contract
- Convert the winning tender schedule into the contract baseline
- Capture key dates, milestones & liquidated damages triggers
- Formal baseline sign-off, ready for administration
Control
- Progress updates against baseline — actual vs planned, % complete
- Rolling look-ahead schedules (2/4/6-week) from the live schedule
- Variance tracking & trend reporting for project controls
Claim
- Schedule Risk Analysis (SRA) for time contingency
- Delay & Extension of Time (EOT) analysis against the baseline
- Time-impact analysis & defensible claim documentation
About Nicholas Porter
With 35+ years of hands-on experience delivering some of Australia's most complex infrastructure projects — including the Suburban Rail Loop, Melbourne Metro Tunnel, West Gate Tunnel, and the Dubai International Airport Expansion — Nicholas Porter bridges the gap between the way construction planning has always worked and the way it needs to work next.
SchedAI is built on that experience directly: the six-stage elicitation conversation is modelled on the same questions a senior planner asks on a real job, and the constraint/interface logic comes from decades of watching what actually delays SME jobs — not a generic scheduling textbook.
SchedAI is one product inside the wider SmartConstructAI ecosystem — Nicholas's practice helping construction businesses adopt practical, ROI-focused AI and automation.
Read the full career history →
Try SchedAI on your next tender
Upload a Bill of Quantities and walk the six-stage build — no account needed to try it.